A BARBECUE IN A SHERRY BODEGA – Score: 9/10
Three years old. In a world where age statements are worn like medals, that number might make some drinkers walk straight past this bottle. They would be making a mistake. Annandale, in Dumfriesshire, first distilled whisky in 1836 before falling silent in 1918; almost a century later it was brought back to life, and since 2014 it has been making both unpeated and peated spirit in the Lowlands – a region better known for gentle, grassy malts than for smoke.
This single cask from independent bottler Whisky Druid is the peated version, distilled in 2015 and bottled in 2019 after maturing in a first-fill Oloroso sherry hogshead, cask #725. Bottled at a hefty 57.6% ABV, unchill-filtered and with natural colour, it yielded 335 bottles. Young spirit, active cask, full strength: a recipe that can go very right or very wrong.
Here it goes very right. The nose is pure smokehouse – smoked meat hanging over a wood fire, rich and savoury – before the sherry steps in with dark chocolate and a basket of red fruits. On the palate the cask strength carries everything with surprising ease: chocolate and cherries wrapped in smoke, the meaty note returning in waves, and a vivid black-pepper heat building towards a long, warming finish.
There is no rough edge, no spirity youth to apologise for – just intensity and balance. Proof that a good cask does not need a decade to make its point, and that the druid on the label clearly knows a little magic.
